Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I’ve taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I’ve chased South Africa’s first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso’s grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault. I’ve edited the magazine’s Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

The Top Companies To Work For In America

A survey just released by WorkplaceDynamics, which specializes in polling employees, ranks the 150 firms it says are the “top” companies to work for in the U.S. Number one on the list: Quicken Loans, followed by The Container Store and Anadarko Petroleum. Fourth on the list: a car dealership called Park Place in Dallas, Texas.

Really? An oil company and a car dealership are two of the most desirable places to work in America? WorkplaceDynamics stands by its list. In fact CEO Doug Claffey says the company’s data set is far more extensive than the information used to compile Fortune’s Best Places to Work list or the list Forbes covers from employee ratings website Glassdoor. Fortune collects info from 277,000 workers at 259 firms and gives respondents an opportunity to write an essay about their workplace, which contributes to the ranking. Glassdoor logs survey results from a half a million workers.

By contrast, WorkplaceDynamics draws its data from 607,000 employee surveys at 872 companies. To qualify for its national survey, a company has to have at least 1,000 U.S. employees and at least 350 employees per firm must respond.

Further, putting together thoughtful surveys, polling employees and crunching the results is pretty much all WorkplaceDynamics does. It supplies data to human resource pros, to executives inside companies and to 37 regional newspapers, from the St. Louis Post Dispatch to the Denver Post, which run their own regional top-places-to-work lists. Based in Exton, Pa., the company has been running employee surveys for seven years.

What sort of questions does WorkplaceDynamics ask? Claffey explains that the survey is short but comprehensive, relying on just 22 questions in three categories: “org health,” “my job,” and “engagement.” Some of the questions seem rather vague in my skeptical view. Example: “The company operates by strong values and ethics.” Employees can fill in one of seven blanks, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” on something called a Likert scale, a common standard in collecting survey data.

But Claffey explains that questions about a company’s values take the survey beyond the “me”-centered queries about pay, benefits, managers, training and work/life balance that its competitors ask. The broader questions come under the “org health” heading. Claffey says those questions, like “I believe this company is going in the right direction,” and “I have confidence in the leader of this company,” have proved to be the best predictor of a firm’s financial performance in its sector. One more example: “At this company, we do things efficiently and well.” These questions are designed, says Claffey, “to be actionable so companies can take these results and do something.”

Though Claffey is convincing about the strengths of WorkplaceDynamics’ questionnaire, it is still striking that companies known for being great places to work, like Google, Facebook, Southwest Airlines and Wegmans, appear nowhere on the list. In some cases, it was simply a matter of not being able to collect enough surveys from a company to satisfy WorkplaceDynamics’ requirements, explains Claffey.

Other seemingly unlikely companies on WorkplaceDynamics’ top ten list: Mattress Firm, a specialty bedding retailer in Houston, Texas, and besides Anadarko, three other energy companies, EOG Resources in Houston, Pioneer Natural Resources in Irving, Texas, and NuStar Energy in San Antonio.

One other company on the top ten list that seems decidedly unsexy: Coyote Logistics in Chicago, an outfit that matches empty trucks with merchandise that needs to be shipped. One big reason it ranks so high, says Claffey, is a company policy focused on hiring smart people out of college, regardless of their major, who the company thinks would be a cultural fit. In other words, Coyote tends to hire friends of friends who already work there. Claffey says he visited Coyote’s office recently and was struck by how the employees, who work in a bullpen arrangement, were all wearing clothes with the Coyote logo and seemed excited about the mission of making sure the system ran efficiently.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Susan, thanks for this. I’m going to review the list carefully. I’m not a fan of most “best place to work” surveys because they are heavy on ‘perks’ and light on leadership and inspiration, the stuff that truly motivates people. This survey looks at an interesting set of factors.

Thanks for your comment Carmine. I think you’re right about the questions WorkplaceDynamics asks, and how they balance queries about personal benefits with employees’ sense of companies’ overall direction. I should have included a link to the survey questions. I’ve added it to the story, and you can see it here: http://www.workplacedynamics.com/features.php

I’m always suspicious of these purported “surveys.” Companies like Quicken put on the full-court press and basically threaten their employees to complete the surveys and tell how their expectations on how to fill them out. Even though the employees are told the surveys are “confidential,” there is not a single employee that believes it. Trust me, I know.

So with this being the case, how is this story anything less than another Quicken Loans media release?

As an employee of QL, I can promise you that no one was threatened over the surveys. We were encouraged to complete them and to be totally honest. It was not mandatory that we do the survey. Everyone I work with loves working for the company and feels blessed.

As an employee of QL, I can promise you that no one was threatened over the surveys. We were encouraged to complete them and to be totally honest. It was not mandatory that we do the survey. Everyone I work with loves working for the company and feels blessed to be a part of it. I try to tell everyone I know to apply for positions at the company. Do you think I would do that if I was not truly happy?